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"[T]he wound can be the gift, the thing that marks you as other can be the place that you actually want to claim as your own, not the place you want to leave. A lot of people in queer studies have a critique of gay marriage politics precisely because it only sees the wound as a wound: the wound of exclusion, we’re not allowed to get married, becomes, “We need to heal this wound by being allowed to get married.” In a lot of queer studies people don’t want to go that route theoretically. What we want to say is, our exclusion from the institution of marriage actually provides us a possibility rather than being a liability. The fact that we’re excluded from marriage culture—-particularly women, people who have been socialized in female bodies—-being excluded from marriage culture is not a bad thing. Feminists for two, three hundred years have been saying that marriage is the coercion of young women into dependence and subsidiary roles in relationship to men. Suddenly, when gays and lesbians decide that they’ve been excluded from a constitutional right, we forget our feminist critiques of marriage, and we forget that the wound can be the gift, and the exclusion can actually provide us with knowledge with how to do intimacy separately from these state-sponsored regulatory institutions."

-Judith "Jack" Halberstam, interviewed about The Queer Art of Failure for Lambda Literary.